CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2008
| Author | Assauov, Kairat Zholdassovich |
|---|---|
| Title | Does Prohibition of Same-Sex Marriage Violate Fourteenth Amendment? |
| Summary | Abstract There are many debates about if the US government should grant gay couples the right to marry under the provisions of the country’s Constitution. Such legal theorists as David Richards and Mark Strasser refer to the Fourteenth Amendment of the Constitution as the grounds for claiming that marriage is a fundamental right to which all the citizens of the States should have access irrespective of their sexual orientation. Generally, this amendment was designed to ensure that all the citizens share the same rights and privileges and have the same legal protection before the law. These legal theorists state that not granting nonheterosexual couples the right to marry is a violation of the Fourteenth Amendment’s provisions which guarantee equal treatment of all the American citizens. My thesis will prove that marriage is one of these rights via the analysis of legal cases of Goodridge v. Department of Health and the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA). The first analysis is about the first successful case that extended the institution of marriage to homosexual people based on the Equal Protection Clause of the State and Federal Constitutions. This case occurred in the state of Massachusetts. Additionally, the state of California except Massachusetts succeeded in providing homosexual couples with the right to marry so far. However, only the state of Massachusetts appealed to the Equal Protection Clause extensively as the basic argument for accepting gay marriage. Moreover, it eloquently displays why marriage is a fundamental right that every citizen should be able to claim. The second analysis explains why the federal government fails to provide homosexual people with the right to marry nevertheless. The analysis of the DOMA proves that the Act itself is contradictory to the Constitution of the USA. |
| Supervisor | Sandor Judit Marcella |
| Department | Gender Studies MA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2008/assauov_kairat.pdf |
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